A friend of mine recently received a pdf purporting to be from the IRS, and I was hoping someone on here may be able to tell me the liklihood that it's not a scam.

The letter claims to be from the Bellevue branch in Washington but it doesn't look like the "normal" structure of a letter. Rather than starting Dear Ms ... it begins with - This is to notify Ms. ...

There are a couple of typo's in it too, in particular ones that would most likely be picked up by a spell checker.

The address at the bottom of the letter is simply given as

Department of TreasuryIRSUSA2013-01-02

Although there is a bellevue address at the top of the letter this one certainly doesn't look to me like a sensible address and the numbers are presumably the date, but clearly not in US (or UK) format.

Finally there is a logo at the top of the letter and there is also a large logo used as the background of the text of the letter.

Clearly I know very little about the US government and the form of the letters they may send out but I am sure that no UK government agency would send out a letter that looked anything like this.

I'm sure it's clear I am very suspicious about this but that might just be my paranoia kicking in and I would appreciate any thoughts either way from someone more knowledgeable than me on the subject.

The person involved is going to contact the IRS branch in London but that could take a while.

thanks

steve

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Yeah thanks rob, I've googled some of it and came up with nothing. I've also googled for IRS letter and notices and they seem to consistently look nothing like this one. What I find odd about this if it is a scam is that the scammer(s) have invested a lot of time for a relatively small amount of money (or at least an amount that is less than I would expect) - in the region of 2000 gbp which is around 3000 usd. Having said all that the circumstances are quite unusual and that's what made me wonder if it might be genuine

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I checked the pdf properties and all it said was IRS in a few of the fields, the pdf is called IRS.pdf which is what made me suspicious in the first place. I would also expect some sort of reference number, a phone number and some other references but none of those are on it. Looking at the current stuff from Google, they make it very clear how much they say you owe them and the various means you can use to pay but on this letter it's just something that's in the middle of the text with little reference of how to pay. To add to this it's purportedly been forwarded from another company i.e. they claim the IRS sent them it and they are passing it on which I find pretty unlikely. I've just re-read it and the "IRS" are insisting that an officer of this other company are contacted to make payment which also sounds pretty unlikely to me

Unfortunately the person concerned is having difficulty getting hold of the IRS here but I'm sure persistence will pay off.

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.